Cyclical

I’m stealing this idea from my friend Eric.

I turn 31 next Sunday. Saying this is not where I expected to be at this age is possibly the understatement of the century, but this is going to be an exercise in vanity that enables me to look back at where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

21

I turned 21 at home in North Carolina, about a week after transferring from Iceland. Since the hottest it ever gets in Iceland was about 60, the heat and humidity of a NC summer was nearly unbearable.

I was home in between duty stations, preparing to change Navy jobs, from lithographer to journalist. I didn’t think about it, but I think that at that point I was still considering a career in the Navy as a viable option. I liked the money and the freedom, and even though I had the usual authority problems, they didn’t seem as pressing while I was on leave.

During that leave period I bought my first (and only) car, a Saturn SL1. I wanted a blue car, but they only had silver on the lot, and I was impatient enough to settle. Saturn took pictures of all the new cars they sold, and I was excited enough about picking it up that I dressed up in my favorite navy blue silk blouse and khaki pants. I still have that picture somewhere, and it never fails to make me smile; only I am enough of a geek to dress up to pick up my new car. I had managed to save $10,000 from working a couple part-time jobs in Kef, and I was mostly proud that I had set up a loan through my bank and didn’t have to deal with the dealer people. I took my parents with me as I went from dealership to dealership because my stepmother was a master haggler, and I remember being really embarrassed when she tried to argue with the Saturn people about the price of my car. I really liked the car I chose, but I mostly went with Saturn because the salespeople actually treated me like an adult. The salesmen at the other dealerships treated me like a little girl whose daddy was spoiling her.

I also bought my first new computer that visit, a Dell tower that I ended up loathing. That computer turned me into an Apple person.

I realize I haven’t actually talked about my birthday yet. I don’t remember much, except that my friend Evan, who I had had a crush on since high school, kissed me. I think I knew that it wasn’t anything, he might even have felt obligated to do it in a way, but it made me feel special and wanted, even if only for that minute.

The drinking age in Iceland was 20, so that birthday is nothing but a haze of drunken impressions. As a result, I didn’t feel the need for 21 to be celebrated in a club, with yet another liquor-induced haze. My friends and I sat in the backyard of my parent’s house and drank, and when I got drunk enough, we wandered through the tiny backstreets of Mt. Pleasant. We never had to worry that we would get run over, even when sitting in the middle of Highway 49 at 3 a.m., laughing and telling absolutely ridiculous jokes and stories. I think this might have been the last time I felt really close with my friends from high school; after I moved to Illinois we gradually grew further and further apart, and now I catch up with them via Facebook status updates and the occasional awkward visit when I go home.

The events surrounding my 21st birthday have had a tremendous influence on my life. When my leave ended I went to Ft. Meade, Maryland, to the Defense Information School (DINFOS). I discovered journalism while I was attempting to escape a shitty boss and a boring life in Keflavik, but I discovered I was good at it while I was at DINFOS. If I hadn’t campaigned so hard to cross-rate, I would have been preparing to get out of the Navy right after my 22nd birthday. I would not have been stationed in Great Lakes. I would not have met Peter. I would not have gone to Columbia College. I would not have studied journalism. I don’t know where I would be right now had I not made that decision, and I sometimes wonder, but most of the time I try not to think about the peculiar forks my life has taken.

On Dating

I’ve been dating since the BF and I broke up. Really, this is the first time I’ve ever “dated” per sey, since nearly all my other dates ended with “boyfriend” becoming appended to the guy’s name. So this is new, and there’s an etiquette that I’m not quite abreast of. For instance: when one of the guys you’re dating wants to date you exclusively, don’t tell him about the awesome date you went on the night before with another guy.

Yes, you’d think this would be common sense, but, due to my limited dating history, I’m used to simultaneously dating and being friends with guys. Part of my friendship includes the lifetime membership to the too much information club, and all the details of my life that entails.

I’ve also learned that when a guy says he’s ok with you not wanting to date exclusively, but then says, “I’ll wait until you’re ready,” that means he’s not really ok with my not wanting to date him exclusively. This realization culminated in an exquisitely awkward conversation, during which you say, “It’s not you, it’s me” completely non-ironically and sincerely for possibly the first time ever.

After dating the BF for so long, I’ve become excellent at platonically friending guys, but my ability to tell if they like me or are interested in dating me has completely withered away. Well, I say that as if that was something at which I ever excelled, but it’s practically deteriorated away by now. So far all the dates I’ve been on have been arranged through dating websites. I have to admit that online dating has broadened by social circle with guys I would probably never have met otherwise, but flirting over broadband is never as satisfying as seeing in-person reactions to the way you move, or what you say. Online dating encompasses a certain progression; by the time you get to meeting in person you’ve generally already reached a tentative level of interest and certainty in compatibility. Not that that’s always true; I went on a date last week with a guy who was a blast to chat with. Just the right level of flirty innuendo and genuine interest, plus his picture was super cute. Unfortunately none of the pixilated attraction translated to the actual dinner table, and half an hour later I was on my own again, walking home in the drifts of dirty leftover snow and wondering which message got so dreadfully garbled in the transition.

My lack of real-world exploratory flirting is my own fault, though, since I’ve been so busy dating two guys that I’ve practically abandoned my friends and the bar games that sustained me until I reached the relatively normal level where I am now. Even though it’s only February and snow is forecast for Thursday, I can almost smell spring in the air, accompanied by the usual feelings of wanderlust and anticipation. This year I’m single for the first time in nearly six years, I wonder what will happen?

Working girl

I still don’t know what I want to do with this blog, or what purpose I want it to serve, but I just paid $9 to renew the domain name, so I figured I’d just write until a plan revealed itself.

I started working at a temp agency in January. Like most jobs, there are benefits and downsides. The novelty of working by the day has been offset by the complete lack of agency I have at the jobs. It’s bizarre to never be given the password to the computer where you’re working, for instance. I’m generally not a fan of temporary arrangements, so this has taken  period of mental adjustment. I say this like I’m an old hand at the temping thing. Me, with my one job under my belt. I was replaced after I answered a question asked by the executive director truthfully. Apparently one should not reveal that making phone calls for six hours a day, asking newspapers whether or not they received an unsolicited op-ed and if they’re going to use it, is not fun.  Who knew? I’ve never been a great liar, and the combination of that and not liking to be lied to myself, has made me generally avoid it when I can. I guess learning when to lie is one of those grown-up skills, though.

There’s been a lot written about how much searching for a job sucks. I’ve been thinking that maybe I should start taking the phrase “job hunting” more literally. I’ll crouch in my nest, eagle-eyed and waiting. When the right job comes wandering over the horizon, I’ll examine its movements, study its style and the employees with which it chooses to surround itself. Then I’ll pounce. Of course, the hunting analogy falls apart after that, because I can’t think of any animals that pounce and then have to wait for weeks in order to find out if their prey approves enough of them to grant them an interview.

Of course, all this would be much easier if I had goals other than “getting a job” at this point. Life was so much easier when I wanted to be a reporter. With that end goal in mind, I had predetermined steps that were recommended and that would likely make that coveted daily newspaper reporter gig mine. Unfortunately, life plans tend to come unraveled, and now mine is sitting at the bottom of a bag in the back of my closet, and me completely unable to knit. Once someone has released one dream, how do you capture another? I’ve been trying on different career ideas, but I’m not sure if I’m limiting myself by self-imposed restrictions. I’m bad at math, so I couldn’t be a programmer; I’d love to go to med school but I’m not smart enough, etc.

Hunting, knitting — apparently I’m feeling very analogy-driven today. I wonder if that’s a function of my having not updated this in a really long time, or if my journalism training has finally been subsumed by all the fiction I’ve been reading?

Tweet, tweet

I resisted joining the so-called Twitterverse for a long time. It’s stupid, I said, who wants to follow anyone so closely? I don’t care that you’re staring existentially into your morning doughnut.

I also felt this way about Wikipedia. As a journalism major in college, at the beginning of each semester we were given the Wikipedia lecture. The Wikipedia lecture was, in many cases, treated more seriously than the plagiarism lecture, and we all actually had to sign a form saying we acknowledged the plagiarism lecture. Wikipedia is not a source. If you cite Wikipedia in an article, you will fail that assignment. In one class, we each created a user account, went in and made a spurious edit to a Wikipedia article and then counted the days until the error was corrected. Most of the people forgot about their edits until halfway through the semester, when they received an email saying their accounts had been suspended.I would go on wild rants to my friends about how much I hated Wikipedia. While I still don’t think that Wikipedia is a legitimate source for most of what I call news, it’s my go-to website if I want to find out if Rudy von Hacklheber was a real guy or just a figment of Neal Stephenson’s imagination.

Anyway, I managed to avoid Twitter until Neil Gaiman joined and started tweeting things that didn’t make it to his blog. Neil Gaiman is apparently the twitter gateway drug. Now I find myself tweeting all the time, to the point that a friend has given me his login so I can tweet random song lyrics. All the Jump, Little Children and Wicked soundtrack you could ever want!

Like most social media, Twitter tends to be what you make of it. If you, like me, only have 24 followers (and only know half of those personally), it’s not really very social. I find Twitter to be very one way: I send links I find amusing out into the ether and, most of the time, nothing more happens with them. Occasionally, someone retweets a link I’ve sent, or I get some crazy following me because they completely misunderstood a link I tweeted. When that happens, I find myself inordinately excited. Look! Someone paid attention to me! I’m like a puppy. There are a whole lot of questions that come with the satisfaction of having been tweeted. Why is this something I value? Is the Twitterverse just an incestuous web of hands patting their own backs? Is this the proverbial sound of one hand clapping?

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ll likely keep tweeting until I get bored or until job ads stop asking for people who are proficient in the 140-character sound bite.

Obviously, I will alert my corner of the twitterverse that I have written a new post for my blog. Perhaps it’s not incestuous so much as it is recursive. Round and round and round we go…

15 months later…

No, it’s not the new hit zombie film in the 28 ____ Later franchise. I am ashamed to say that I have not updated this blog since I started grad school, even though it was ostensibly created in order to apply what I learned to the real world.

One of the main reasons I haven’t updated in so long isn’t necessarily that I had nothing to say (let’s be honest, when has that ever stopped me before?) but that after a while the self-imposed pressure of coming up with something brilliant enough to justify my long absence was intimidating. I have decided that was ridiculous, though, and this brief update will be my reintroduction into the so-called blogosphere.

Do I even still have any readers?

Irresponsible CNN

We have a gigantic TV on in the office pretty much all the time, and while that can be handy sometimes, more often than not it’s distracting and annoying.

Sometimes you see something that makes you wish you were paying closer attention to the tv, however, and that happened to me just a few minutes ago. CNN had a segment about staying healthy while you travel, and I looked over just in time to see “Take antibiotics with you!” Because I couldn’t believe that any news organization, no matter how fluffy, would actually propose taking antibiotics with you “just in case,” I found the segment on CNN.com. The whole article was only marginally better, saying:

1. If you’re worried about the food or water, bring an antibiotic with you

Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky, an expert consultant in the division of global migration and quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control, recommends either azithromycin or a drug in the quinolone family, such as ciprofloxacin. You can get these only with a doctor’s prescription.

Because Cipro is harmless! From a LegalView press release:

Cipro, on the other hand, is an antibiotic that treats bacterial infections, similar to Ketek, but it has been linked to a very serious link of Achilles tendon rupture and tendonitis among patients. Cipro, which belongs to the fluoroquinolone drug family, recently had its labeling increased to a black-box warning along with the rest of the fluoroquinolone drugs. The black box labeling is the strongest label given by the FDA for a prescription drug and it often warns physicians about the serious Cipro risks associated with consuming the prescription antibiotic.

Cipro was, of course, the antibiotic pushed by the FDA after the anthrax attacks in 2001. Bayer held the patent until 2003, and there were serious issues with both the supply line and the cost of the drug. Even beyond the drug they’re choosing to recommend, is the fact that Americans are so inundated with antibiotics and antibacterials that we’re seeing a rise in diseases that aren’t affected by the drugs we have.

CNN offers a form for complaints related to its programming. I sent them a message, saying

During a show on safe traveling, your “expert” mentioned that you should take antibiotics with you, “just in case.” This is incredibly irresponsible, not only because there are different antibiotics for different health issues, but also because taking antibiotics you don’t need contributes to antibiotic-resistant killers like MDR Tuberculosis.

I know 24 hours is a long time to fill, CNN, but if you really want to be the “most trusted name in news” you have to give me legitimate information.

Seriously, folks, look it over before you hit send

So, I’m an intern. This might make me thoroughly unqualified for giving any kind of resume advice, but I’ve never been one to ignore an opportunity to expound on subjects about which I know nothing.

The organization for which I’m interning this summer, The Center for Independent Media, is a progressive media group. We have a number of sites in different states, including the Washington Independent. I’ve been organizing resumes and cover letters for a Capitol Hill reporter position that they’re hoping to fill within the month. There are a couple of points I’d like to make about applying for a job.

1) Seriously, folks, look your resume over for spelling and grammar issues. This is at the top of every single “Resume tips and hints” article I’ve ever read, and I still have cover letters that said “I’ve have professional work experience on Capitol Hill…,” another that read “Your one woman reporter, videographer, online web editor,” and a third that had the word referrals on her resume twice, spelled two different ways, neither of which was correct. I talked about a couple of these with the person who is actually doing the hiring, and he said I may as well throw those away and not even bother giving them to him. We have one 3-month position open and at least 50 resumes. It’s not even a matter of standing out from the crowd, if you have these kind of blatant mistakes you’re not even going to make it into consideration.

2) Research your organization. CIM bills itself as “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization,” but if you check out the sites it sponsors, it becomes very obvious very quickly that they’re actually pretty liberal. If you want a job with a liberal organization, you’re probably not going to get very far starting your cover letter with, “[Name] was appointed by President George W. Bush to currently serve at NASA…” It may or may not be fair, it may or may not be discrimination, but there’s a fairly good chance that if you’re a Bush political appointee, you’re not going to enjoy working for a progressive media company.

3) This goes along with researching the organization, but deserves a number of its own. We are a web site that publishes blogs and longer stories. We do a little video, but it’s mainly the type of video that does not require editing and is uploaded to YouTube. If you send your resume with a link to your work, and that work is entirely in front of a camera, i.e. being an anchor, we’re going to assume you did no research and have no idea what the job entails and will deposit you in the circular file. All of CIM’s news sites are linked from the homepage. It’s not hard.

4) The executive assistant who had to print out all the cover letters, resumes and clips for the hiring people to go through has said that she much prefers PDFs. In her ideal world, she would receive an email with a general, “I’m applying for the Capitol Hill reporter position. Attached are resume, cover letter and clips.” in the body. The cover letter and resume would be together in one PDF, the clips would be together in another. Two total attachments. She also told me that, in her experience, people in D.C. much prefer PDFs to word documents as attachments. Your mileage may vary on that, but she’s the gatekeeper for every resume that comes into this office.

5) I have no idea of the frequency of this, but I’ve listened to the hiring manager make several reference calls this summer. If you are not completely confident that the person you have listed as a reference will provide a glowing description of you and your work, don’t list them. Seriously. If that person has any problem with you or your work or your personality, it will come out in this phone call. The hiring guy got off one phone call earlier this month just shaking his head and laughing. When I asked him what he was laughing at, he said he had a candidate that was absolutely perfect on paper. Right experience, right clips, everything was great. But when he called one of the candidate’s references, he got a completely different story, and as a result of that phone call the candidate was out of the running. I’m not saying that you should lie, or that you should list a reference that’s going to lie for you. But, just as I wouldn’t put my former boss down as a reference because of the mutual personal hatred I felt for him, you shouldn’t put someone down who you think might say something that will make a hiring director think second thoughts.

Again, I don’t actually have a job right now, so you can take this with all the grains of salt you want. Still, having talked to hiring managers, I’m certainly taking these tips to heart.

Fun with framing

There’s a story in the Washington Post today declaring that John McCain has promised more of the same with respect to judicial nominations.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee said that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “would serve as the model for my own nominees, if that responsibility falls to me,” highlighting the gap between Republicans and Democrats on the question of who should sit on the Supreme Court. Both justices have established strong conservative records since Bush appointed them, and the appointment of one more conservative to the nation’s highest court could tip the balance on issues such as abortion, discrimination, civil liberties and private property.

None of this is a surprise from the man who is becoming Bush lite. However, the article quotes ” a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia who heads the Ethics and Public Policy Center” and gives a fascinating look into the effectiveness of framing.

Edward Whelan, a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia who heads the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the speech “very encouraging” and added: “McCain has drawn a clear line between his support for judicial restraint and Obama’s promise to appoint liberal judicial activists.”

Do you see what he did? There are two choices: liberal judicial activists and  justices who favor judicial restraint. No such thing as a “conservative judicial activist” who might make politically-inspired decisions about the issues. Even the wording is misleading-”support for judicial restraint.” What does that mean?
What that implies to me is that McCain is going to take all the powers Bush has appointed himself with and, as opposed to giving even a token nod to the balance of powers, will clothe himself in the robes of an imperial presidency.

I guess McCain is counting on the 28 percent of Americans who still manage to be willfully blind and/or stupid enough to support Bush.

Hey, Pew, check out the library sometime

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad that wide attention is finally being paid to the conditions of animals in factory farms. The Washington Post has a story today revealing the findings of two new studies.

Factory farming takes a big, hidden toll on human health and the environment, is undermining rural America’s economic stability and fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock increasingly demanded by American consumers, concludes an independent, 2 1/2 -year analysis that calls for major changes in the way corporate agriculture produces meat, milk and eggs.

The only problem with these “new” findings? I read about them way back in 2001, in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and more recently in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Doesn’t it seem like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Pew Charitable Trust (PDF link) could have saved 2 1/2 years of effort and money by simply endorsing one or both of these books? At the very least, I would think they owe the two authors some sort of acknowledgement for the work they’ve done in raising awareness with the general public.

In other news, the World Bank has said that “the grain required to fill a 25-gallon sport-utility vehicle tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.” Yet Bush still insists on ethanol subsidies, in the face of world food shortages.

“In terms of the international situation, we are deeply concerned about food prices here at home, and we’re deeply concerned about people who don’t have food abroad,” Bush told a news conference.

He said the rise in food prices has been caused by weather, increased demand and energy prices, while only a small part is due to the production of corn-based ethanol.

“And the truth of the matter is, it’s in our national interest that we — our farmers — grow energy, as opposed to us purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us.”

There’s always a choice

I don’t understand this moral outrage people feel about the rising cost of gas. The Declaration of Independence does not say we have the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and cheap gas. That’s not the way it works. That’s not the way capitalism works.

I’ll admit that I might be biased. I sold my car when I moved to Chicago, and now that I’m in D.C. I frequently look around at gridlock and giggle to myself. Yeah, my commute to work is an hour and a half each way, but I’ve read 32 books this year and usually arrive to work calm and not ranting about the idiots on 270.

I’m not going to argue about whether or not OPEC is a cartel, or debate the role the war in Iraq is playing in gas prices in the U.S., but I think there comes a time when you have to take some responsibility. If you live in a city like Chicago, New York, D.C., or San Francisco and you don’t take public transportation at least one day a week, you have no right to complain. You’re the reason why more cities don’t have public transit systems.